[BRIEF NOTE] Good Sense from a Warblogger

The Norwegian warblogger Bjørn Stærk has recently commented on the growing trend of equating Islam with Islamism as a first step towards the proscription of the Islamic religion and of Muslim individuals:

We have to build our moral judgments on a solid foundation. You can't say if terrorism is good or evil without knowing what terrorism is. You can't say if Islam is good or evil without knowing what Islam is. And unfortunately, unlike a political method used by a small number of people, it is very difficult to know what a 1400 year old religion with 1.3 billion believers really "is".

You certainly won't find the answer in a few quotes from the Koran, or in the statements of a few Muslims. To describe something big and complex, you need a big and complex description, supported by a huge number of carefully assembled facts. Impossible? Historians do this all the time. There's an interesting parallel here: Good historians embrace the complexity of their subject. They approach the mountain of evidence they base their work on with humility and a sense of duty towards the truth. And they will be honest with you about the limits of their craft. Bad historians treat the mountain of historical evidence as a catalog they can pick and choose facts from, to back up sensational and simplistic theories.

He concludes that

Something has gone rotten. We can't blame it on the "left", the "relativists", the "PC crowd" or the "multiculturalists", (and don't anybody dare blame it on the Muslims). It's gone rotten here, among people who on 9/11 woke up to the danger of Islamism. The ban Islam meme and all its relatives (Islam is Islamism, Islam is war) must be confronted here, now, before it spreads.

His post's comments section is more-than-usually depressing to read. Still, at least someone's who has credibility with the warblogger crowd is commenting on this. A clash of civilizations that would not only be horrifically destructive on all sides but which is quite evitable isn't a good thing to pencil in for the 21st century.

[META] Blogroll Updates

I've altered the link to Russell Arben Fox's blog (now In Media Res) and added a link to redrunner's web comic .

[BRIEF NOTE] How to Destroy Israel

In today's Jerusalem Post, Ron Breiman--"chairman of Professors for a Strong Israel"--has written an article called "Stop transfer." The transfer that's he's referring to isn't the proposal to remove Arabs from greater Israel, no:

Unlike Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, whose failed plans gambled on tranquilizing the public with promises of "peace" and "a new Middle East," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon doesn't even bother to use anesthetic verbiage before laying his patients on the operating table.

From Beilin to Sharon, the common denominator is transfer. Forget the neutral terms "disengagement," or "evacuation" or "dismantlement." We are talking about transfer.
The transfer of Jews from their homes in their own country because they are Jews. If that's not racism, what is?

Breiman's central point is at the end of the article:

Clarify that transfer will destroy Israel as a sovereign state. A state that retreats in the face of terror, that accepts terrorist ultimatums and burrows itself into the ground or, in the words of Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah, "behind spider web barriers," will find itself swept out of the Middle East by the fire of terrorism ignited in the wake of the revelation of its weakness.

Clarify that transfer will destroy Israel as Jewish state: He who relinquishes claims to the Temple Mount relinquishes all claim to the land of Israel.

Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are the heart of the Jewish people; Judea and Samaria are its arteries; not Tel Aviv or Herzliya. On the 100th anniversary of Herzl's death it is well to remember that Zionism arose in order to gather the People of Israel into the Land of Israel, before there was a "Green Line, or "occupied territories," or "the occupation."

An Israel that relinquishes the Temple Mount and recognizes it as being "abroad" is not a state and is not Jewish.

Now, if Israelis accepted Breiman's thesis that the West Bank and metropolitan Israel are interchangeable and that the Jewish settlements established in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip should not only remain (as a fundamental point of policy) but that they should be expanded, regardless of international opinion, then their country will be doomed.

Consider that If Israel does as Breiman suggests, then the logic for identifying Israel as an apartheid state becomes much stronger: Israel really would be a settler state run purely for the benefit of a minority population of Jews, regardless of the will of a mostly disenfranchised Arab population, with the minority population's settlements continuously spreading and surrounding Arab bantustans. It would be no more racist to oppose Jewish self-determination in that context than it would have been to oppose Afrikaner self-determination in the context of the apartheid regime of the 1980s, for any people's right to self-determination cannot and should not be so blatantly exercised to the exclusion of others. Inasmuch as I've no faith in the ability of a binational Jewish-Palestinian state to survive without falling into a civil war that would make Lebanon's a minor dust-up between drunken friends, this would be a bad solution; inasmuch as there'd be no alternative between that and supporting apartheid, it would be not particularly worse than any other solution.

Here's to hoping that Breiman doesn't get his way.